This week we have seen many miracles! We have been finding success in
our finding activities. We have an investigator named C who is 15 years old.
Her family isn't interested but they said that if she wants to
investigate she is more than welcome to. She has been very out front
with us about being atheist and not really expecting an answer. She has
told us that she genuinely wants to know mostly because she sees how
much faith we have in what we do, but she hasn't kept any of our
commitments. We had a "pep talk" with her about needing to do her part
and we told her that for now, all we wanted her to do was have personal prayer with the
intent to find out that this is true. We nagged her the first few days, then
forgot to keep reminding her, then we had our meeting on Saturday where
we gave her and her family a tour of the church. Right when she walks
in and we're about to say a prayer, she says to her mom "well, I guess
now's a good time to tell them. I want to be baptized". We were
totally stunned! I asked her how her answer came and she said that she
finally prayed the night before, and in the morning she just knew it was
true and that she needed to search harder and deeper. We were so
stoked! That night the bishops family (they are her fellowshippers)
invited her to church and offered a ride, and when she got to church the
next day they just took her under their wing and loved her up. I am so
grateful for the Worsleys and all they have done for C! They are
just the best. They truly have magnified their callings to be
missionaries, and now C is feeling the Spirit both in their home,
at church, and in her own personal prayers.
We started
teaching a young man named J. We knocked on his door and he asked us
a bunch of questions on the door step. We asked if we could come back
another day and start teaching him these lessons which would answer a
lot of his questions, and he said yes. We taught him for the first time
earlier in the week, and I had a very humbling experience. The whole
lesson, I was just a robot. From square one, it was all "muscle memory"
rather than following the Spirit. I recognized that right off the bat
but as I tried to fix it, nothing worked. I was praying so hard on the
inside that God would take over, and nothing happened to me. But God
answers prayers in His own way. He didn't change my feelings or my
actions, he didn't fill me with the Spirit so that I could teach more
powerfully, but instead, he opened J's heart, so that even though I
was on auto pilot, he still felt the truth of our message. That was a
testimony to me that the Spirit was working through him, and that this
work is not my own. This is the Lords work, and He's gonna do it the
way He wants to, whether we're down or not. What a blessing that was,
that despite my own imperfection, he still felt the testimony of the
Spirit in our message.
I saw G and M this
week! G is the guy that we taught in the Rushville jail back in
Gordon, and M is from Manderson (on the Pine Ridge Reservation).
Gene lives up here so we went and visited him. It was a blast from the
past to see him!
For the first time in my entire
mission, I have been allowed to help someone move in when just walking
by. No one this whole time has allowed us to, and in the last 2 weeks,
we've had 3 people allow us to! It was fun to just serve these people.
One of families we helped move live in the same apartment complex as
us, and they were just so happy that we came to help. They were smiling
from ear to ear, and that's the best reward you could get. He told us
that now we are his first friends in the area, and we'll always be
welcome in his home. His name was Dutch, and he's Jamaican. Sweet
accent, for sure.
That's about it for me this week. Love you all!
Elder Carter V
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